Support Resonance FM

You can help support Resonance FM by going along to the studio and donating your voice. I have already done this. It was a unique experience, and strangely fun… But Resonance still need a further 100–150 participants. The new Resonance studio is just around the corner from Tate Modern, so you can help Resonance on your way to seeing the great Yoko Ono show! Sign up via this QR code or at the link below…

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https://fundraiser.resonance.fm/donate-your-voice

Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018)…

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Up the Anti-detective!

I have a short article on ‘crime fiction’s experimental counter-tradition’ in the new April 2024 issue of #RedHerrings, journal of the The Crime Writers’ Association, referencing Jorge Luis Borges, Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, and Oulipo, among others.

This is subscriber content for CWA members RN, but I’ll share a PDF here in a month or two!

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Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018)…

NEW: to receive occasional book news and invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

Six years ago…

Six years ago today it was the morning after the night before, 11 January, when around 250 people had joined us for the launch of The Fountain in the Forest at one of London’s greatest bookshops, Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street. What a thrill. This photo of me and editor Lee Brackstone, then of Faber and Faber, now of the stupendous music list White Rabbit Books, was taken by Chris Dorley-Brown. Thanks, all!

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Buy The Fountain in the Forest currently 55% off on A*azon. (N.B. correct at time of writing – price liable to change)

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Mailing list update

If you’d like to receive occasional book news and invitations to my launches and events, it’s easy to sign-up, and you can unsubscribe at any time ;)

Tony White reading at Beaconsfield, London. Photo © Marianne Magnin, 2015

Just posting this again because I recently shifted to a new provider. If you already subscribe there is no need to do anything – but FYI my old ‘Tiny Letter’ sign-up page (which is linked from older posts on this site) will die very shortly as the service is being discontinued by Mail Chimp.

Onwards!

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Buy The Fountain in the Forest currently 55% off on A*azon. (N.B. correct at time of writing – price liable to change)

NEW: to receive occasional book news and invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year to all

Seasonal greetings and peace to all – with thanks for your friendship and support over the past year.

(In case you were wondering, these Christmas wreaths are from the street doors of houses in south west London, spotted while walking in the area over the past couple of weeks.)

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Buy The Fountain in the Forest currently 55% off on A*azon. (N.B. correct at time of writing – price liable to change)

NEW: to receive invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

55% OFF THE FOUNTAIN IN THE FOREST

UPDATE: THIS OFFER HAS NOW ENDED… I usually try and support independent bookshops, but I know that many readers buy from A*azon. So just in case it is useful to know, at time of writing A*azon are offering Faber & Faber’s first edition of The Fountain in the Forest at 55% off. That’s the trade paperback with Luke Bird’s stunning and influential jacket design featuring flourescent green typography, as seen here in Alison’s photograph!

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Buy The Fountain in the Forest currently 55% off on A*azon. (N.B. correct at time of writing – price liable to change)

NEW: to receive invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

London at dawn

No, it’s not a steampunk typewriter, or a primitive computer in some Jet Age laboratory. It’s a second generation Post Office ‘Code Desk’, and in the first half of the 1990s I learned to type on these behemoths. And if it looks like a machine from another age, that’s because it is.

Museum Collection

If you knew me in the early ’90s, chances are you’d have known that I worked for the Royal Mail, and did everything else around the long shifts and the anti-social hours required. A lot of my working day – whether on late or early shifts – would have involved sitting at a machine almost identical to this one. With the (adjustable-height) keyboard low on my lap, and my headphones on, the fan blowing to keep me awake, I’d have been watching letters whizz by and typing frenetically.

‘Oyessoyess! I never dramped of prebeing a postman,’ says James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. And nor had I, but there was a recession on, and I saw an ad in the Camden New Journal. Passing an intensive touch-typing course in the first couple of weeks was, they told me at the interview, a necessary qualification for the job. It’s a skill that has stood me in very good stead as an author ever since.

A product of the wave of advances in postal technology, from mechanisation to automation, and still operating into the early days of email, these Code Desks enabled their operators to translate the post code that was part of the address written onto each letter into a system of more-easily machine-readable dots that would be printed onto each item. In the absence of a visible post code, the names of certain ‘Post Towns’ and cities could be rendered as a ‘short-code’. The Code Desk output was boxed up and fed directly into another huge machine nearby that sorted the letters on towards their destination by reading said dots.

In the then Royal Mail NW1 Mail Centre on St Pancras Way, London, where I worked as Postman Higher Grade or ‘PHG’ (until NW1 and N1 merged, and we all moved up to the N1 Mail Centre on its huge site behind the Almeida Theatre, on Upper Street in Islington, a site long-since redeveloped into luxury flats and restaurants, etc.) there were two long lines of Code Desks, perhaps as many as forty or fifty in total. Each of which could process thousands of letters per day. Letters to be coded were stacked end-on along a conveyor that ran right to left along the top of the machine. They’d jiggle along the belt then drop down a chute one-by-one, to be routed around and appear face-out on the lectern surface in front of the operator. It was really noisy – the sound of all those conveyor belts going at once in all these great clattering machines. Letters would pass from right to left, stopping in front of you for just long enough that you could type the post code, then (IIRC) you’d immediately hit the right hand ‘space bar’ key with your thumb to send that item off and line up the next. You’d do a couple of thousand an hour.

My old Royal Mail tie

Unlike the machine illustrated above, the keyboards on the Code Desks in London NW1 and N1 were intentionally left blank. The thinking being, we were told, that if you had to look down and search for the correct key every time then you’d never hit the numerical target of items-per-hour. Whereas if you were trained to touch-type on a blank keyboard with a very low error rate, you wouldn’t need to waste time looking for the key for each letter, you simply knew where they were by muscle memory.

That muscle memory lasts a long time.

Here’s an interview with another former Code Desk Operator (from a different office), that was published by the Postal Museum and Archive as part of their Sorting Britain exhibition last year. That’s where the Code Desk photo above came from too.

By the time I left the Royal Mail, these Code Desks were starting to be phased out in favour of ‘video coding’, but by then I’d been transferred to non-coding duties, sorting the ‘NW1 Inward’ by hand on the night shift. I wrote most of the first draft of my 1999 novel Charlieunclenorfolktango in long-hand during the tea and dinner breaks on those night shifts at Upper Street through 1996.

More recently, a job application form asked applicants to enumerate the usual employment history. It also (quite progressively, i thought) asked applicants to state what they had learned from each job or work experience listed. Against my job for Royal Mail, I wrote ‘touch-typing’, ‘St John Ambulance first-aider (expired)’, and ‘London at dawn.’

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Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest direct from publisher Faber and Faber…

NEW: to receive invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

Missorts Volume II

I was pleasantly surprised on Wednesday to see an ultra-rarity from my back-list on the Fiction A-Z shelves at Waterstones Gower Street in London! So surprised indeed that I posted a photo on my Instagram, just in case any completists had missed out on the book when it was first released. I’m pleased to say that it was sold within about an hour of my post!

ICYMI Missorts Volume II is a novella set in Bristol. It was beautifully published in this very limited edition paperback in 2013, by the brilliant and much missed Bristol-based producers Situations. The striking cover design – based on a Royal Mail letter sorting frame – is by An Endless Supply.

Missorts Volume II has been out of print for quite a few years, so I’m thrilled and very grateful that it turned up on these highly-contested shelves now.

If you see another copy ‘in the wild’ (as they say), do let me know!

You can read Richard Marshall’s review of Missorts Volume II for 3am Magazine here…

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Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest direct from publisher Faber and Faber…

NEW: to receive invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…

Alison Turnbull, Spring Snow: a translation

A quick post FYI — Matt’s Gallery in London are running a promotion on artist’s books by Alison Turnbull from their online shop.

These include Turnbull’s extraordinary colour-chart translation of Yukio Mishima’s novel Spring Snow, to which I was privileged to write an introduction.

Turnbull’s Spring Snow: a translation is an object of great beauty, but it is also I think something of a rarity now. Certainly the publisher Book Works are currently showing it as out of print, so if you missed it when it came out, this may be your last and only chance to get hold of a copy!

UPDATE: MATT’S HAVE NOW SOLD OUT

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Buy Spring Snow: a translation by Alison Turnbull from Matt’s Gallery…

Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest direct from publisher Faber and Faber…

NEW: to receive invites to forthcoming events and launches, sign up for my *new improved* newsletter…